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An introduction to the difference between Couchsurfing, Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, and Etsy

The sharing economy: We all have an understanding of it, but describing it is still a challenge.

We’ve also heard it called many things: “sharing economy”, “collaborative consumption”, “peer economy”, “on-demand”, and even “peer-to-peer marketplaces”.

All the companies placed in these categories have similar attributes: they wed supply and demand. Too often, however, we use the phrases interchangeably when there are actually key differences that should be considered in order to understand how these new categories shape our economy.

The phrase “sharing economy”, most similar to “collaborative consumption” and “peer economy”, suggests an economy based on resources, and not on any abstract system of money. For example, one of the most pure representations of the sharing economy would have to be Couchsurfing, which was founded over a decade ago.

As a host on Couchsurfing, you offer a spare bedroom in your home (or even just a couch) to “surfers”, usually foreigners travelling through the area who need a place to crash. In this case, there’s no exchange of money whatsoever, reflecting a true sharing model.

Yet Uber and Airbnb, not Couchsurfing, are considered the biggest “sharing economy” companies out there, most likely because Airbnb and Uber are valued at $25.5 billion and $62.5 billion, respectively. So where’s the sharing? Someone is either hiring an Uber or renting an Airbnb unit. The only “sharing” piece of the resources used is that the cars and the spaces are owned by individuals and are often underused assets, such as a car, space, and in some cases, a person’s time.

But there’s still money being exchanged. Uber and Airbnb would better be described as “peer economy” companies, because “peer-to-peer” is a decentralized system versus a more traditional capitalist system, where a business owner owns the production and hires the labor. In either case, however, money changes hands.

Further discrepancies arise when you take a closer look at these two peer economy companies. Most obviously, Uber is an “on-demand” service powered by “peer-to-peer labor”, whereas Airbnb is more of a marketplace. One can get a room on-demand, but that’s not a core part of the platform. And there’s no labor component at all.

This differs from Uber, when every Uber call is immediate. It’s an action that demands immediate action.

So what are the other on-demand startups out there that also aggregate labor? Dozens of food delivery companies (e.g. DoorDash and Instacart), household errands and services (e.g. Handy, TaskRabbit), and many others (e.g. Postmates, YourMechanic, Staffly)—these are less “sharing” economy companies, and more “excess labor” companies. In the case of these companies, there are no assets being shared, but services are being provided by a person.

Companies like Breather, WeWork, and Rover, on the other hand, are more like Airbnb, in that they’re marketplaces, with an on-demand component, but not an excess “labor” component.

Finally, there are the peer-to-peer models that are pure marketplaces, including Etsy, Shapeways, Vinted, and Wallapop. For example, Vinted has no “on-demand” component, but it is a flavor of the peer-to-peer model since individuals are buying, selling, and swapping each other’s clothes. It’s basically Amazon for secondhand clothing.

But across all these companies, consumers are still paying, which is why the Harvard Business Review argues we should be calling Airbnb and all its peers (Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Instacart, Handy, etc.) part of an “access economy”, not a sharing economy:

Sharing is a form of social exchange that takes place among people known to each other, without any profit. Sharing is an established practice, and dominates particular aspects of our life, such as within the family. By sharing and collectively consuming the household space of the home, family members establish a communal identity. When “sharing” is market-mediated — when a company is an intermediary between consumers who don’t know each other — it is no longer sharing at all. Rather, consumers are paying to access someone else’s goods or services for a particular period of time. It is an economic exchange, and consumers are after utilitarian, rather than social, value.

While HBR makes a solid point, however, it doesn’t look like their article (published a little over a year ago) will make any inroads in changing how we speak about this new generation of companies. As a phrase and category, the “sharing economy” is here to stay, and it will continue to be used to describe services as wildly different as Couchsurfing (a website where people host strangers in their home for free), Uber and Lyft (apps where you press a button to hail a ride from a company contractor), and Vinted (an online marketplace where people buy, sell, and swap clothing).

My next pieces will expand on the sharing economy divisions introduced above, and will reveal how even “peer-to-peer” and “on-demand” are broad umbrella categories that don’t always mean the same thing in every case.

This is a pretty hot and interesting topic, so I’ll try to make an objective and well referenced answer.

First, you need to know that YouTubers get paid by Adsense and not YouTube. YouTube is monetized by Adsense.

Adsense basically generated to Google billions of dollars (most of Google’s income), it is possibly Google’s most valuable asset. Adsense is one hell phenomenal product of artificial intelligence, cannot be cheated and has a complex way of generating ads and paying the publisher or content producer using a CPM formula.

Google says: There’s no precise answer, because your earnings will depend on a number of factors.

With 500 attendees and some big names from the data privacy and human rights fields, the Don’t Spy on Us Day of Action was a fascinating afternoon of discussion, debate, and practical advice on how to keep our personal data private from snooping governments. I learned a lot, and I’ve condensed the most important parts of what I’ve learned into five main points.

I’ve also included five things you can do right now to make a difference, both for yourself and for other internet users.

1. Online Privacy Isn’t Just About Protecting Our Data

While keeping our personal data private online is important, the Don’t Spy On Us campaign and others like it emphasize the bigger picture. The speakers didn’t include just security experts; there were a number of human rights advocates and important figures from the press, and discussion ranged from governmental privilege and judicial oversight to the nature of democracy, international cooperation, self-determination, and social relations.

Bruce Schneier (@schneierblog), a security and cryptography expert that we’ve interviewed before, discussed our right to have control over our public face and the people who see it (for example, you can act differently around your family and your friends). But being constantly surveilled violates that right, because you no longer have any control over which information is being shared or who has access to it.

As Carly Nyst (@carlynyst) pointed out, privacy is the ability to choose who has your information and what they do with it. Mass surveillance is dependent on neither of these things being possible.

There was also a great deal of discussion about governmental transparency in surveillance programs, and a number of experts emphasized the need for judicial oversight of the digital intelligence community. At the moment, most of the oversight is political, and oversight committees often include former intelligence officials.

Of course, the government isn’t the only group that’s to blame; Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) pointed out that companies are doing a lot of spying on behalf of the government by turning over vast amounts of data (the recent Vodafone law enforcement disclosure report provides evidence for this).

Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) discussed how he and his friends had e-mail discussions when they were teens to explore their politics and views, which sometimes ranged into the radical. Could they have been identified as extremists and targeted for further surveillance? What else might a paranoid government do if they felt that discussions like these were a threat? If people are afraid of punishment for sharing their opinions because of government monitoring, the argument goes, the right of free speech has been violated.

“Privacy is the ability to choose who has your information and what they do with it.” – Carly Nyst

As you can see, there’s a huge variety of issues that all tie into online privacy—and this is just a small sample.

2. Privacy Is An International Issue

While this event focused on information privacy and security in the UK (and, to a lesser degree, in the US), it quickly became clear that it needs to be addressed on an international level. Caspar Bowden (@CasparBowden), a privacy expert and former chief privacy advisor at Microsoft, repeatedly pointed out that the American government uses different standards when surveilling American citizens and foreigners or immigrants, and made the claim that this was a violation of the European Human Right Convention.

And with the NSA’s cooperation with GCHQ, it’s clear that countries are willing to share information and, effectively, gather masses of data on behalf of other countries, further convoluting the oversight issue. Carly Nyst pointed out that agreements between governments on intelligence-gathering tactics are often completely shrouded in secrecy, making any sort of oversight difficult, if not impossible.

It’s easy to focus on what’s happening wherever you are, but it’s important to take an international perspective and make your voice heard in many places around the world.

3. Economics Is Our Best Bet For Making A Difference

One of the most common themes of the day was what we can do to take a stand against mass surveillance, and there were generally two points made: first, that the most important action that we can take as concerned citizens is political. Second, in the words of Bruce Schneier, “the NSA is subject to the laws of economics.”

Earlier in the day, Cory Doctorow stated that it costs less than a penny to add someone to the NSA’s or GCHQ’s monitoring lists—at the moment, it’s more economically feasible for these agencies to collect data on everyone because it’s so easy. And while political statements are extremely important, we can also fight back on the economic front by making it more difficult, and thus more expensive, to put millions of people on watch.

Even if it costs a few pennies to add someone to a surveillance list, that’s going to make a huge difference in the long run. And when it becomes expensive enough, it will become more economically efficient for governments to only surveil people who are under suspicion of committing a crime.

“The NSA is subject to the laws of economics.” – Bruce Schneier

So how do we make it more expensive? In short, encryption (keep reading to find out which encryption tools were recommended at the hands-on session of the afternoon). By encrypting our traffic and communication online, we make it much more difficult for intelligence agencies to monitor what we’re doing. Of course, no encryption protocol is perfect; eventually, encryption can be broken. But going through that effort costs a lot more than simply adding an IP address to a list. And when it becomes more economically efficient to monitor only people who are under suspicion of nefarious activities, mass surveillance will stop.

4. DRM And Copyright Laws Are Big Issues

One of Doctorow’s primary areas of advocacy centers around digital rights management (DRM) and copyright law. DRM allows companies to manage how users access their software; for example, the DRM on a Kindle book prevents you from opening it on someone else’s Kindle. The DRM on Netflix prevents you from streaming video unless you have the proper access codes on your computer. And Firefox now packs DRM from Adobe, meaning Adobe has gained some measure of control over how you use your browser.

So why is DRM such a big deal? Because it makes security research and testing much more difficult, and often illegal. Even when security flaws are found, people can be nervous about reporting them, meaning that known security risks could go unreported. In addition to this, DRM functions by giving some control of your computer over to the rights holder; and if someone can impersonate the rights holder, they now have some of that control.

Fighting against DRM is a great way to show that this betrayal isn’t acceptable, and to show that consumers are willing to take action to take back control of their devices.

As I was preparing this article, Chris Hoffman’s great piece Is DRM a Threat to Computer Security? was published. Go check it out for a great explanation of DRM and the trouble it causes.

5. “Nothing To Hide, Nothing To Fear” Is Still A Common Argument

“If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a very common line when discussing privacy issues, both from the people who support the programs and those who don’t fully understand them. It might sound like a reasonable argument. But upon reflection, it’s just not true.

Adam D. Moore sums it up nicely in three points in Privacy Rights: Moral and Legal Foundations: first, if we have a right to privacy, then “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” is irrelevant. When we lose control of who has access to our information and what they do with it, our rights are being violated, and that’s never a good thing.

Second, even if people aren’t engaging in illegal activities, they may be taking part in activities or hold beliefs that aren’t accepted by the dominant culture in which they live—whether they hold a different religion than the majority one, hold radical political beliefs, or practice any sort of alternative lifestyle—and want to hide them. If someone’s interest in Marxism, polygamy, or Islam was leaked to the public, they could face character defamation. This is especially of concern when there’s no telling who will come into power next—reading about Sikhism at the library isn’t a crime today, but what if it is tomorrow? And you’re on record as having done it?

And, finally, if having nothing to hide means having nothing to fear, then why are politicians and intelligence agencies so averse to total transparency for their agencies? Bruce Schneier framed this argument as a power imbalance: privacy increases power, while transparency reduces it. By violating citizens’ right to privacy and refusing to be transparent, government agencies are increasing the power imbalance between citizens and their government.

As discussed above, privacy is a much more complicated issue than just keeping one’s activities a secret: it relates to human rights on a broad scale. And the “nothing to hide, nothing to fear” argument is inadequate for addressing the complex issues that are at stake in the mass surveillance battle.

What Can You Do?

In addition to a large amount of political discussion, attendees of the Don’t Spy On Us event received some really useful pieces of advice, both on how to protect themselves from snooping and on how to make a difference in the fight against uninhibited mass surveillance.

1. Show your support

This is absolutely crucial. Sign up with the organizations listed below, get your name on petitions, and speak out. Follow privacy advocates on Twitter (I’ve tried to link to as many as possible throughout this article), post their articles on Facebook, and tell your friends and family about the important issues at stake. Concerted action by the internet denizens stopped SOPA and PIPA (remember the Wikipedia blackout?).

We can stop PRISM and TEMPORA, too. There are a lot of people out there working to defend our right to privacy, but they need as much help as they can get.

“This will only stop politically. This is a political issue.” – Bruce Schneier

There are a lot of others out there—leave your suggestions in the comments! And don’t forget to take every chance you can to show your congressional or parliamentary representatives that you care about your privacy and that mass violations and infringements on our rights, both from governments and private companies, are unacceptable.

And there are tons more. Just run a search from the menu bar and you’ll find what you’re looking for. You can also check out this great handout from the Day of Action, courtesy of The Occupied Times:

3. Throw a cryptoparty

As I mentioned earlier, the more people that are using encryption, the more secure we’re going to be. Once we reach a critical mass, surveillance will need to become more targeted to be cost-effective. And one of the best ways to share the importance of encryption, as well as make it easy for people to start using the proper tools, is to throw a cryptoparty.

There’s an official group that runs big parties around the world, but you don’t need to go that big. Just throw your own cryptoparty! Have your friends over, tell them to bring their devices, and help them install encryption tools. That’s all there is to it! To make it more fun, don’t make crypto the focus of the party, but just do it in the background (or during half-time of a World Cup game, maybe). Install things like HTTPS Everywhere, OTR-compatible IM tools, PGP e-mail tools, and secure messaging apps.

If people are interested in heavier-duty things, like encrypting their hard drives or cloud storage, help them out with that, too. But don’t pressure anyone into anything—the point of a cryptoparty is to have fun and improve privacy and security. In that order.

While there are certainly closed-source tools that will help you protect your privacy, point #4 above makes it easy to see why open-source software is likely to be more secure. If a program is DRM- and copyright-protected, there are parts of it that are invisible to you, which means no one can be looking for bugs or even intentional security holes. When you can, use open-source alternatives to popular software. It shows companies that transparency is valued by consumers.

Fight Back, Encrypt, Share

Online privacy and mass surveillance are very complicated issues, which is why there are entire organizations dedicated to educating the public about fighting back. It might feel hopeless at times, or like it’s not worth doing, but the fight back against the mass infringement on our rights is worth the time and effort. Encrypting your browsing or your e-mail doesn’t take much, but if even 30% of people did it, we’d make a huge statement that would be impossible to ignore.

Please share this article, and get more people thinking about their online rights and privacy. And fill up the comments section with links for others to learn more, sign petitions, get involved, and make a difference.

It’s going to take a lot of cooperation to do this, so let’s start right here!

Internet activists are fighting back against Internet surveillance, but what do they hope to accomplish?

If you visit Reddit, Upworthy, the Daily Kos, or a number of other websites today, you might notice that they are displaying a banner that urges Web surfers to “fight back” against Internet surveillance. Or perhaps some of your friends’ Twitter avatars are now covered by a #StoptheNSA icon.

What’s going on? Feb. 11 has been designated as “The Day We Fight Back” by a broad coalition of activist groups, companies, and online platforms. Organizers are hoping to replicate the response they received for the 2012 Internet “blackout” that targeted the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), which resulted in lawmakers withdrawing both bills.

The effort is also intended to remember activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life in Jan. 2013. In 2011, Swartz was arrested for downloading 4.8 million articles from JSTOR, a non-profit archive of academic journals, after tapping into the site from a computer wiring closet at MIT. He was charged with four separate felonies that could have landed him in jail for years. Supporters said the punishment was too harsh and in the wake of his death, have been pushing for updates to computer security laws.

So what’s the back story on “The Day We Fight Back” and what do organizers hope to accomplish? Read on.

What are organizers fighting back against? Last year, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released a treasure trove of classified documents to journalists to shed light on what he said was the NSA’s illegal activity. The NSA has defended its actions, arguing that it is sanctioned by Congress and necessary to protect us from terrorists, but President Obama admitted recently that changes are necessary, at least when it comes to the collection of phone metadata. But things aren’t changing fast enough for Internet activists, who hope “The Day We Fight Back” will help spur Congress into real action.

What type of things are they concerned about? One of the first things the Snowden documents revealed was the collection of phone metadata on a grand scale. Verizon Communications, for example, was ordered to hand over all of its phone records for a three-month period. The feds argued that the content of these calls was not recorded, but detractors said the demands are overly broad and include data about innocent Americans. Meanwhile, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) can order tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and more to hand over customer data, but the secret nature of the court means those companies cannot discuss the details of their cooperation with the feds.

That seems a little sketchy, right? It’s a slippery slope. If the feds are trying to track down a dangerous criminal and believe they are using Gmail, Facebook, or Outlook to communicate, you don’t want to tip off those criminals, so secrecy is key. But the extent of the secrecy provided by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is a bit extreme, which is why top tech companies asked for permission to reveal more data about national security-related requests in their quarterly transparency reports. The feds offered a compromise whereby companies could mix in national security requests with other non-classified data. But the companies pushed back, and the Justice Department recently granted a compromise: they could break out the data in batches depending on the data revealed.

But that didn’t satisfy privacy advocates, right? Nope, because the data is still being collected; it’s just being done in a slightly more transparent manner.

So what’s the fix? The Electronic Frontier Foundation urged supporters to back the USA FREEDOM Act from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, which it said “could well be our best shot at fixing some of the worst problems with NSA surveillance.” It’s not perfect, according to the EFF; it doesn’t really address “excessive secrecy” or NSA efforts to crack encryption or tap into the data centers of tech firms, among other things. But it “stands in sharp contrast” to a bill from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which organizers say will just bolster existing programs.

How does Aaron Swartz fit into this? As organizers described it, “Aaron sparked and helped guide the movement that would eventually defeat the Stop Online Piracy Act in January 2012. That bill would have destroyed the Internet as we know it, by blocking access to sites that allowed for user-generated content – the very thing that makes the Internet so dynamic.” As a result, “The Day We Fight Back” is in his honor, as he certainly would’ve been on the front lines, they said.

How is this similar to the 2012 SOPA/PIPA protest? Like the SOPA and PIPA blackout, organizers are asking supporters to add a banner to their homepage that says they are “sick of complaining about the NSA,” and want new laws to curtail online surveillance.

How does it differ? In 2012, the protest went the extra step of shutting down popular websites for a day, like Wikipedia, to demonstrate how SOPA and PIPA might impact the Web. It also garnered support from major players like Google and Facebook, which didn’t shut down their sites, but displayed banners in solidarity with the protest’s mission. Today, however, Google is displaying a link to its Internet safety center on Google.com, and said in a blog post that “we strongly believe that government surveillance programs should operate under a legal framework that is rule-bound, narrowly tailored, transparent, and subject to oversight.”

What can I do? If you don’t have a website that can support a banner, organizers are asking people to change their profile photos on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ or share some anti-surveillance photos posted on the event’s website. Any discussion on social media should also include the #StoptheNSA hashtag. There will also be events around the globe, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Utah, and Minnesota in the U.S.

PARKLAND, Fla. (Reuters) - A teenager accused of fatally shooting 17 people at a Florida high school was investigated by police and state officials as far back as 2016 after slashing his arm in a social media video, and saying he wanted to buy a gun, but authorities determined he was receiving sufficient support, newspapers said on Saturday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Russian propaganda arm oversaw a criminal and espionage conspiracy to tamper in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign to support Donald Trump and disparage Hillary Clinton, said an indictment released on Friday that revealed more details than previously known about Moscow's purported effort to interfere.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has drawn a new accusation of bank fraud from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office, according to court documents made public on Friday.

MIAMI (Reuters) - Student survivors of a mass shooting that killed 17 people at a Florida high school called for gun restrictions on Saturday during an angry and somber rally, but attendees at a nearby gun show said firearms could not be blamed for the massacre.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Facebook Inc will start using postcards sent by U.S. mail later this year to verify the identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S. election-related advertising on its site, a senior company executive said on Saturday.

SAN FRANCISCO/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Russian influence operation designed to tamper with the 2016 U.S. presidential election used a combination of old-school espionage tactics and 21st-century technologies that will not be easy to stop, even now that the methods have been exposed, experts said.

MAGNITOGORSK, Russia (Reuters) - Unknown hackers stole 339.5 million roubles ($6 million) from a Russian bank last year in an attack using the SWIFT international payments messaging system, the Russian central bank said on Friday.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A Belgian court threatened Facebook on Friday with a fine of up to 100 million euros ($125 million) if it continued to break privacy laws by tracking people on third-party websites.